I wrote Great Games, Local Rules in the hope of
facilitating a dialogue between observers of Central Asia and
international relations scholars interested in the political
dynamics of the post-Cold War world. For too long, the latter group
has ignored Central Asia, dismissing it as an exotic arena of
imperial competition and opaque local tradition that is of little
global relevance. Specifically, I wished to flag what I considered
important trends of the multipolar regional order—U.S. tacit
security bargains and declining normative power, the Russian-led
backlash against Western democratic norms and human rights
promotion, and China's rise as a dominant economic player. Most
importantly, I wanted to draw wider attention to the statecraft of
the Central Asian states, demonstrating how relatively weaker
states can still channel, translate, and manipulate external
interests and agendas for their own domestic political
purposes.

Engaging in an Asia Policy discussion about these
ideas is therefore a deeply enriching and humbling opportunity, for
the scholars assembled in this forum are all distinguished
researchers and long-time observers of the Eurasian political
landscape. A short response cannot do all of their points justice
so I look forward to engaging with the important issues they raise
beyond just these pages.

I have grouped my response to the reviews into three categories
of topics raised by the roundtable participants: (1) the
appropriateness of my analytical framework for explaining major
regional developments and interactions, (2) the relevance of
Central Asia's lessons to other areas of the post-Cold War world,
and (3) the implications for U.S. policy toward the region
following the planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014.

The Analytical Framework of Great Games, Local Rules

My main analytical purpose in the book is to show how the "big
three" external powers have sought different strategic goals in the
region, but I also illuminate how, in addition to competition, the
external powers have cooperated, mimicked, and learned from one
another as they interacted in the Central Asian arena. All the
while, the region's autocrats have used these external interactions
as opportunities to extract resources to preserve their regimes,
feed their domestic patronage machines, and push back against
external criticism or conditions that might threaten the political
status quo. James Sherr identifies these patrimonial dynamics as
the political antithesis of western liberal and democratic
institutions, though he is prudent to caution that the region's
patrimonialism is neither pure nor immune from all transformative
attempts. Yet the lens of patronage politics provides what I think
is a theoretically useful assumption for examining
internal-external interactions. Rent-seeking, pseudo-reforms, and
competing norms are logical consequences that flow from these
political imperatives, rather than an exceptional or even
culturally bound set of local behaviors.

Nevertheless, in a bid for parsimony, I do oversimplify. Kathryn
Stoner rightly suspects that the different flavors of
authoritarianism within the region might also affect their patterns
of external engagement. How else can one explain Turkmenistan's
latching onto China so quickly as its main external patron, the
close Kazakh-Russian partnership, or the prickly relations of
repressive and paranoid Uzbek president Islam Karimov with both
Moscow and Washington? Marlene Laruelle accurately notes that
societal actors, such as businesses and migrants, are absent from
my state-centric account, while Enders Wimbush and Sherr point out
that some of the Central Asian states have graduated beyond these
elite-led imperatives and are pursuing external engagements with
the purpose of both enhancing their international standing
(Kazakhstan especially) and influencing the region more broadly (in
the case of Uzbekistan). These are fair and important observations.
And even competitive patrimonialism has its limits. As Erica Marat
observes, Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev overplayed his hand
when he initiated a public bidding war between Russia and the
United States over the Manas airbase.

Although regional elites undoubtedly will be concerned with an
increasingly complex array of personal, social, and national
agendas going forward, it is worth recalling the region's political
context during the 2000s. All of the regions' rulers consolidated
their grip on power and then proceeded to securitize their coercive
organs in response to counterterrorism imperatives and perceptions
of imminent transnational regime...

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